Methanol Production

[mikeo80]

I had a lot of twigs and small branches come down during some of the recent windstorms. I went out and worked for about an hour cleaning this crap up As I was doing this, I started to think. (Please get the women and children to the lifeboats! )

My thoughts wandered into methanol. Small twigs and branches strike me as excellent fodder for a still. I know that they would have to chopped up a lot finer than I did.

I guess that I cleaned up 10-15 Kg of trash in the hour I worked. A small still in T2K needs 30 Kg of crap a day to keep running. (V2.2, Pg 59)

So, 2 - 3 hours of gathering, an hour of prep, and the still is happy. For today. You have to do this again tomorrow.

Any thoughts or comments on my math are welcome.

My $0.02

Mike

[.45cultist]

Depends on how much "sugar" is in the material. Perhaps one might mix in flowers or cornstalks. A maple might be enough.

[kato13]

Unfortunately the game designers got methanol totally wrong.

Using basic methods you can only extract 20 liters of methanol from 1000kg of wood. (Plasma gassification would be a non-"basic" method)

From wood you could make ethanol if you have sulfuric acid to break down the cellulose or have cellulose metabolizing yeast (something they are only just working on now).

More discussion here.
http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=226

[mikeo80]

Originally Posted by kato13

Unfortunately the game designers got methanol totally wrong.

Using basic methods you can only extract 20 liters of methanol from 1000kg of wood. (Plasma gassification would be a non-"basic" method)

From wood you could make ethanol if you have sulfuric acid to break down the cellulose or have cellulose metabolizing yeast (something they are only just working on now).

More discussion here.
http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=226

With that being said, just what the heck are the vehicles in T2K going to run on?

If Methanol is not productive, ethanol is great, except most of the grain or beets or potatoes that exist in Europe are going into peoples stomachs, Petroleum is a dream from a lifetime ago.

So, any ideas what could be used?

My $0.02

Mike

[kato13]

In 2007 scientists came up with a yeast that produced its own cellulose disrupting enzymes. You could always push that back 25 years and make ethanol production from cellulose take 50-100% longer than production from sugar.

In the real world the yeast has had issues but that is an easier magic wand to wave than ignoring some of the basic rules of chemistry and biology.

There really are not many other good options.

Biodiesel is too disruptive to food-stocks and high lipid algae is no where near ready for primetime.

[schnickelfritz]

If I remember right there is a method for converting used cooking greases/oils into crude biodiesel...the whole "My Jetta smells like freedom fries" thing. I would not expect it to run well in a more advanced diesel, but would expect it to run OK in a multifuel engine or older conventional diesel.

As long as you would have a number of restaurants/kitchens/rendering locations nearby, you probably could make a fair amount of it, at least in the context of a T2K 1998-2002.

-Dave